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US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

bbc.co.uk

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Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#231

Post by lax4ever »

tombert wrote: post #170
mizzack wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely disingenuous to use CFR to drive home a point about absolute deaths rates in a population. People with asymptomatic infections (which are the majority of them) do not have any reason to get tested, so they do not count as "cases".

That's probably true, so maybe the 2% death rate is too high, again, let's assume that the OP's point of 0.5% is accurate. As I said, that still implies that if everyone in the United States got it, 1.5 million of them would die (320,000,000 * .005). That's a lot of people. If a government did nothing to prevent a terrorist attack that killed 1.5 million people, most people would (rightly) be pretty upset. EDIT: Also…

While I can appreciate where you are coming from, countering a terrorist attack typically has something that we don't have with COVID and that is information. The world was introduced and expected to react to this disease without any sort of "tactical" knowledge. Even if you include the other four variants of coronavirus, the availability of information can still be considered sorely lacking. Discounting government-provided information, even medical sources had a harder time providing a consensus on how the disease was transmitted during the first few months. That the larger questions like why we have such a large population that appears to be asymptomatic remains unanswered while we are still being pushed to "one-size-fits-all" remedy (and a remedy that appears to only be there to debase the severity of symptoms) doesn't help. Unfortunately, we need information, and information is going to take time. The long term arguments for health side effects are on both sides of the coin here.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#232

Post by bosie »

jdminhbg wrote: post #216
Eduard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kneejerk statistics 101 reaction. * Hormonal birth control - years of research. Years of evidence and practice. Knowing what to do when this and that happens. Recommendations for women with known conditions not to take this and that hormonal birth control. * Novel vaccination - barely month of research. Weeks of evidence and practice. We don't have best practices yet. I'm fine with anyone to make a decision o…

> This is kneejerk statistics 101 reaction. Sometimes the answer is easy. > Hormonal birth control - years of research This is kneejerk status quo bias. > I'm fine with anyone to make a decision on them own to take these vaccinations. Great, but the FDA is not. That's the issue here.

>> Hormonal birth control - years of research

> This is kneejerk status quo bias.

mind expanding why years of research is a 'bias'?

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#233

Post by throwaway0a5e »

xiphias2 wrote: post #213

Why didn't they stop the vaccinations in women under age of 60/65? I'm a 40 year old man, if I were a woman I wouldn't take J&J or AstraZeneca, but as I'm a man, I think it's worth to take the risk of the side effects of the vaccination.

Using a machete when you should be using a scalpel (though to be fair at the time it looked like a filet knife was the tool for the job) has been more or less how this pandemic has been handled since day 1. Why would that change now?

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#234

Post by throwaway894345 »

cheph wrote: post #158
majewsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about. When an immunologist talks about "long-term side effects" of a vaccination, they're usually considering time ranges on the order of 6-8 weeks. Meanwhile, the 10000s of patients from the big Phase 3 trials have been vaccinated for 6-9 months, so the u…

> Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about. Fair enough, but the comment I responded to said: "We know that there are no side effects that are common enough to be of real concern." Given this statement is not qualified for timescale, I want to know what the basis for it is. How does the pers…

People need to remember that we're not taking the vaccine for fun, we're taking it because COVID is out there and we know for certain that it has some lethal side effects as well as non-lethal side effects and possibly other long-term side effects that we don't yet know about. We weigh that risk against the risk that there might be some long-term side effects of the vaccine. To the best of our knowledge, the risks posed by COVID are more dire than those posed by the vaccines and we basically have to choose one.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#235

Post by dahfizz »

ceejayoz wrote: post #109
laplacesdemon48 wrote: post #103

Both the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines use an adenovirus to deliver DNA instead of mRNA wrapped in lipid (like Moderna & Pfizer). Everywhere I read about the J&J vaccine, I see something like "the DNA vaccine doesn't alter your DNA". Can somebody please clear this up? As far as I understand, the mRNA just stays in the cytoplasm of the cell and gets used up by the ribosome to create spike proteins. The adenovirus vecto…

Being in the nucleus and being integrated into your chromosomes so that they are copied during cell division aren't the same thing. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9160... > Adenoviruses -- even as they occur in nature -- just do not have the capacity to alter DNA. Unlike retroviruses such as HIV or lentiviruses, wild-type adenoviruses do not carry the enzymatic machinery necessary for integra…

This sounds a bit like a technicality. The DNA makes it into the cell nucleus and is used by the cell machinery to make proteins. The changes aren't carried over after cell division, but lots of cells in your body last your whole life (nerves, brain cells, eye cells, important stuff).

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#236

Post by spazrunaway »

conistonwater wrote: post #187
symlinkk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point he’s trying to make is that if you’re in a low risk group (let’s say under 30 for example) maybe it’s a better idea to just skip the vaccine.

Wait, that doesn't sound quite right: the benefit of taking the vaccine goes not only to you, it's also to the people you would have otherwise infected by spreading the virus yourself.

Put your life on the line for the community, comrade! And sign away your right to legal recourse should you die as a result. You're on your own! You owe the community your life, and the community owes you nothing!

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#237

Post by jellicle »

DennisP wrote: post #209
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

Six cases in seven million administered doses. One death. Meanwhile, hormonal birth control causes clots in 1/1,000 women. No one blinks an eye. The vaccine hesitancy this engenders is likely gonna kill more than that one person. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1381936112311148548 > Public health bureaucrats have some weird habits in how they reason under uncertainty and how they communicate to the public. I…

People keep saying this will add to vaccine hesitancy but I'm not convinced. The vaccine-hesitant are already skeptical of authorities and aren't going to be especially reassured just because US agencies say it's fine, when it's already hit the news that European agencies have halted J&J. Seeing US agencies halting J&J while continuing the other vaccines could even be reassuring. It shows that US agencies really are…

What you will find is that the vaccine-hesitant are perfectly happy to take the word of authorities who say "this vaccine is unsafe" and only have trouble accepting the word of authorities who say "this vaccine is safe".

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#238

Post by DangerousPie »

cheph wrote: post #158
majewsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about. When an immunologist talks about "long-term side effects" of a vaccination, they're usually considering time ranges on the order of 6-8 weeks. Meanwhile, the 10000s of patients from the big Phase 3 trials have been vaccinated for 6-9 months, so the u…

> Not a doctor, but from what I've heard from immunologists, vaccines in general are incredibly unlikely to have long-term side effects on the scales that you think about. Fair enough, but the comment I responded to said: "We know that there are no side effects that are common enough to be of real concern." Given this statement is not qualified for timescale, I want to know what the basis for it is. How does the pers…

You can never know anything for sure. This is why science, medicine and drug approvals are all about probabilities and calculated risks. If everyone suddenly dropped dead 10 years after taking a drug that was approved in 2015 there is no way we could know that right now. But we know it's very, very unlikely, so we accept that risk.

With vaccines we know from decades of experience that severe side effects tend to occur very shortly (days or maybe weeks) after the injection. So this is why vaccine trials observe participants for weeks or months, not years, before concluding that the vaccine is safe. Of course this doesn't guarantee that the Covid vaccine don't happen to be an exception. But if that was the approach we took then we would never be able to approve anything, and never get the benefits we know for sure it brings.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#239

Post by toast0 »

mhb wrote: post #74
refurb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing. A similar issue was seen with heparin a decade or so back. Basically the heparin molecule (an impurity I believe) was causing an immune reaction that cross reacted with a protein that activates platelets. Not a minor side effect and until the full extent of the issue is known (who is at high risk? How do we treat if it happens) I don’t blame them for being cautious.

Your sympathy for them being cautious begs the question of whether the vaccine, with its uncertainty, is worth using. The cost of waiting to use it is significant - people will die from COVID. It's not enough to say you're being cautious. You have to explain why you think it is better to be cautious about administering the vaccine with its attendant risks or to pay the QALYs incurred by the delay when people who woul…

Pausing this one vaccine type to collect data and determine appropriate actions to mitigate this side effect is reasonable.

This is a low probability event, and the appropriate mitigation may be to do nothing; but there may be some common factor for these patients that might indicate use of a different vaccine or maybe informing people of symptoms of blood clots and what to do if they see symptoms.

The real risk here is eroding confidence in government health sources in general, and vaccines in specific. There were certainly unknown risks before, but now there is a known risk which deserves some study.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#240

Post by ceejayoz »

loonster wrote: post #225
conistonwater wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, that doesn't sound quite right: the benefit of taking the vaccine goes not only to you, it's also to the people you would have otherwise infected by spreading the virus yourself.

And if they get infected, they will also become immune (and likely a better immunity than the vaccine).

Or, you know... die. Like 3M+ people have worldwide already.
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